None of which seem to be worth your time to discuss?
What's there to discuss? He simply postulates the ability of robotics and automated manufacturing plants to do what he wants them to do, and the technology just doesn't exist.
"There are plenty of frontiers we have here on earth" Where? Palestine?
Science, engineering, politics, spirituality.
I happen to think that the sociological experiment in America improved life in Europe.
The American "social experiment" worked the way it did because the entire continent had an enormous wealth in natural resources. Mars, in contrast, is a barren wasteland.
And if you're really keen on conducting sociological experiments in barren wastelands, you can do so at a fraction of the cost in plenty of "uninhabitable" places right here on earth.
so I think that having a not-on-Earth petri dish to incubate some new forms of society would be helpful.
A colony on Mars isn't going to be much different from, say, an oil rig or a scientific outpost in Antarctica, except that it's going to be even more expensive. Where exactly are the "new forms of society" going to come from in that kind of environment?
I think that science and progress are not going to be possible in the socio-political climate here on Earth,
Well, and I think the only way we're ever going to colonize other worlds is if we spend the next several centuries making progress here on earth: science, engineering, tinkering with our own biology, social sciences, etc. Only then will we be ready for space. It's not even a question of whether it's the right thing to do, we simply don't have a choice.
We effectively went to the moon with slide rules in one decade once we set it as a goal.
Yes, and we could probably pull off a similar trip to Mars at corresponding costs. The result? If everything worked out, we'd get some Mars rocks, a few days on Mars, and bragging rights. Just like the moon, that kind of landing would not result in a real manned space program or a long-term presence. That kind of project doesn't survive a cost-benefit analysis, and it's not what Zubrin is proposing.
Out of curiosity why is it that you think Zubrin's approach is something which should take decades?
Zubrin proposes a plan that results in a sustainable presence, and for that you need a lot more than "slide rules": you need robotic probes, fully automated manufacturing plants, etc. Neither existing software nor hardware are anywhere near up to that challenge. Even once the technology exists, it will take a number of consecutive missions to test and deploy those probes before people can fly.
No matter how you look at it, even if we followed Zubrin's proposal as much as we can, we'd have decades of robotic probe development and deployment ahead of us.
I do agree that the guy is a bit optimistic regarding cost but he is certainly right that current costs are severely bloated by the atrocity that is cost plus contracting.
The laws of politics are just as limiting for space exploration as the laws of physics.
There are numerous private companies competing to get into space and the prospect of real money for real goals met could be just the shot in the arm those programs need to get beyond the misty eyed dreamer phase most of them have become mired in.
I don't see any indication that the new private space companies are any better than the old ones.
"[No, the reason why we got the ISS and the space shuttles is because of] space nuts who have been watching too much science fiction"
You were involved in arguing for the ISS and the space shuttles??? You must be quite old then.
All of these problems are solvable with simple extrapolations of our current well-proven launch technologies.
Zubrin's argument involves a lot of other economic and technological assumptions.
A fraud? The fraud is that there are other ways to address mankind's ills besides finding new places to put people. [...] Frankly, I dismiss your attitude as self-destructive and self-loathing.
From your statements, it's pretty clear that the self-loathing is on your side: you have so much self-loathing that you think humanity's problems are not fixable, all you want to do is run away from them.
Of course, the irony is that running away doesn't work, it exacerbates the problem. If you think sustainability, population control, and conflict resolution is hard on a planet like Earth, that's nothing compared to what it would have to be inside a domed city on Mars.
Whatever the expected lifetime of the human species on earth may be, because of the much smaller population size and tougher conditions, they lifetime of every off-world colony is going to be a tiny fraction of that; as a consequence, off-world colonies are not going to be a viable means of ensuring human survival until we have both mastered our own biology and have a lot more technology at our disposal.
I believe that, without a frontier, humanity becomes impacted and stagnant.
There are plenty of frontiers we have here on earth, it's just that people like you aren't up to the challenge and want to run away from them. It's you who is self-loathing, anti-science, and anti-progress.
So if something catastrophic happens to Earth, you want mankind's existence in the universe to end.
Selling the idea of a Martian colony as a safeguard against an asteroid hitting earth is a fraud; there is no way a colony on Mars would survive an asteroid hit on earth.
The only way to have an autonomous Mars colony would be to terraform Mars, but for that, preexisting colonization is more of a hindrance than an advantage.
Dashboard isn't a trademark, only a product name (Techically Gnome could be sued because Apple now have the trademark on that, even though Gnome was first).
Yes: Apple has a choice in the naming of their products, and they choose names that conflict with existing usage. Of course, it's more likely ignorance and stupidity on Apple's part, rather than deliberate strategy, given that they have gotten burned by it before (cf Rendezvous/Bonjour).
And, technically, Apple should get their butt kicked if they try to sue Gnome because the logical end result would be that the name was generic for software long before Apple applied for a trademark. I hope they do.
The only secure way on current hardware for automated authentication is not to embed passwords in source code. If you're willing to use extra hardware, your best bet is a smart card.
The Wikipedia article on toxoplasmosis puts this pretty well:
Although the pathogen has been detected on the fur of cats, it has not been found in an infectious form, and direct infection from handling cats is generally believed to be very rare.
So, you're not likely to get the parasite from touching everyday objects.
Why the excitement? Ignoring all HTPC's completely (which can do the above and more)
I dispute that the HTPC "can" do anything; my experience with it is that it works for a few months and then things gradually stop working. I eventually erased mine completely and it's running Linux now. My home is Windows-free now, except for the rare occasion when I boot into Windows for playing some particular game.
the Xbox 360 can do the above with a Windows box with ease (especially with Vista).
Xbox 360 is itself a rip-off of other boxes and functionality. And if it only works with Windows, I'm not interested.
In any case, the point of such a product is not innovation, it's price, design, form factor, reliability, and functionality. Personally, I'd rather have an Apple iTV sitting on my TV than any box by Microsoft.
As if Apple ever cared about other people's trademarks or designation. "Apple" itself had a predictable conflict. "Dashboard" conflicts with Gnome. Etc.
OS/2 was a fairly well-designed system for its day. Vista is a haphazardly grown "me too" system that is largely a rip-off of features from OS X, UNIX, and Linux.
Of course, there are some analogies: OS/2 was slow on the initially available PCs, but it didn't take long for OS/2 to become a nimble alternative to Windows as machines became faster, Windows got more bloated, and OS/2 stayed roughly the same.
Unlike OS/2, and like previous versions of Windows, Vista will sell: users will have no alternative. If the high pressure sales tactics Microsoft is employing now aren't sufficient, then Microsoft will simply introduce more and more incompatibilities into software and on-line services. So, in the most important respect, Vista is not like OS/2: OS/2 failed because users didn't want it, but what users want or don't want won't make a difference with Vista.
I don't want Vista, just like I didn't want XP, but I will inevitably end up paying for several copies anyway.
And, you might do well to put away your ad hominem attacks
WHAT "ad hominems"?
I don't disagree with you because I am stupid or ignorant or wrongheaded or mislead.
You're simply failing to make an argument supporting your assertions.
You seem to think that Zubrin's numbers are wrong, but you don't do anything to convince me that you've studied the problem any more closely than he has.
Look, it's not rocket science: you can look at the real-world launch capabilities, transit times, costs, and success rates of sending payloads to Mars and extrapolate.
The Moon missions were 30 years ago.
Yes, and they were a bloody waste of money. Back then, at least people had the excuse that they lacked the technology for a complex robotic mission, but these days, not even that excuse exists.
Robots are great. However, gathering scientific data is not the most important goal of space flight. Going places is the most important goal of space flight.
OK, well, it's a good start that you admit that there is no significant scientific reason for manned space exploration over robotic space exploration.
As for non-scientific reasons, my answer is simple: I'm not interested in non-scientific space exploration. If it comes down to a choice between a manned space program and no space program at all, I'll rather choose no space program at all. Not only is the money better spent on other issues, a manned space program raises illusory hopes that we can escape our problems on earth by escaping to other planets. A manned space program is a fraud as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, there is more ice in the interior of Greenland. The amount of ice in the interior of Greenland depends on the amount of precipitation, not the temperature. That is, warmer temperatures don't reduce the amount of ice in the interior of Greenland as long as the temperatures stay below the melting point. But warmer temperatures increase the amount of moisture in the air and therefore the amount of precipitation in the interior, and that leads to more ice there.
By comparison, some of the strongest snowfalls are in the Sierra Nevada, even though it is not particularly cold, because the air coming in from the Pacific is full of moisture.
Warmer temperatures only decrease the amount of ice in those areas where the temperatures are already near the melting point, which is exactly what we're seeing in the melting and breaking up of ice sheets.
So, overall, more ice in the interior and more ice breaking off from ice shelfs are both consistent with global warming.
Eventually, of course, the temperatures in the interior of Greenland are going to get high enough that the glaciers there start to melt, and then you will see a decrease of the thickness of the ice there. But that's probably still a few decades off.
At this stage, a human is still many times more versatile as a troubleshooter than any machine. We can't seem to build machines yet that react to the unforeseen, whereas intelligent humans can.
For the cost of sending an astronaut, we can send hundreds of individual space probes to Mars. Even if only a few percent of them actually achieved their mission objectives, we'd still come out way ahead in terms of scientific and technological results per dollars spent.
No, the ISS tells you what NASA was able to negotiate out of Congress. It is a technological and exploratory dead end, and exists as a welfare project for the contractors scattered across 50 states. Much better to use that money to fund a REAL manned space program.
NASA could fund contractors just as easily with robotic probes or manned moon or Mars missions. No, the reason why we got the ISS and the space shuttles is because of space nuts who have been watching too much science fiction. And history is repeating itself with people like you pushing prematurely for a manned Mars program. The manned moon and Mars program are going to be the next ISS and space shuttle: overly expensive and of no scientific value, provided they get off the ground at all and don't get canceled first.
And contractors love manned moon and Mars missions since the probability that things get canceled is so high: they never have to do anything that works. At least with dozens of small, robotic missions, mission success and failure for each mission will be obvious.
The Mars Society has made a pretty good case, with detailed mission profiles. The key concept is in-situ propellant production. Rather than shipping your return fuel to Mars, send a dry return vehicle and fuel it on the surface by refining atmospheric gases.
Yes, those are nice ideas. After we have experience with many dozens of robotics probe over the next several decades, we may start a project like that.
If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend. Dr. Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars". I found him extremely convincing.
Well, he is right about the approach, but wrong about the costs and time frame.
Note also that it is pointless to complain about NASA's corporate welfare; those are political realities. Comparing actual, politically workable projects against some a project in a hypothetical, efficient funding environment doesn't make sense. Think about what kind of pork barrel and fraud starting a manned Mars mission would lead to if started now, even if it were technologically feasible. Lots of small, robotic missions are the better choice for now.
No, it just means that the ice that broke off is 5000 years old, nothing more. The structure itself might be much older.
Even if it's actually the structure itself that formed 5000 years ago, that may not be because of temperature, it may be because that's when the glacier reached the water.
But we should start sending the probes soon (like now) to prepare for colonization 15 years from now.
It will take decades and lots of missions just to develop and test the necessary technology for a robotic preparation for an extended stay manned Mars mission, let alone colonization.
BTW - I'm just saying that a Mars mission shouldn't be a "tag and run" type affair.
That's what the current drive for a manned Mars mission will end up planning for, and even that will likely get canceled before it ever gets off the ground. In the meantime, the necessary research and testing of robotic probes is not happening.
That's simply not true. If you'd like to outline why you think it's not feasible, we can have a productive discussion.
Our current capabilities are pretty clear: the ISS tells you what is possible in terms of manned presence in space and at what cost, and the current Mars probes tell you what is possible in terms of launching and landing payloads to Mars. Just extrapolate that to the kind of payload necessary to get men to Mars and back.
NASA could establish a permanent presence on Mars within 20 years for a fraction of their current budget.
Well, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that is possible.
Send a group of people (of both genders so as to make breeding possible) to Mars with enough supplies to live for a year or two.
Sorry, but if you do the math, you'll find that's simply not possible.
The only way humans are going to stay on Mars for any period of time is if that stay is prepared by a fleet of robotic probes, probes that locate usable water, usable energy sources, and generate clean water, stored energy, and breathable atmosphere long before humans ever land.
We absolutely must master robotic space exploration before we can perform any useful manned missions.
Why? Why not have the first mission designed integrally with the ideal of establishing a long-term presence?
Because we lack the money and the technology to do it. We can't even keep that bucket of junk called the ISS going, and Mars is orders of magnitude tougher and more costly to get to and inhabit than the ISS.
Even if the first Mars-tronauts aren't colonists, I think they should absolutely be setting up the colonists' house.
I also absolutely think Detroit should be shipping nuclear powered, anti-gravity flying cars. But they aren't because it's not feasible.
Robotic exploration is what's killing NASA; if they don't restart manned exploratory missions, they're going to go into a death spiral
Quite to the contrary: NASA has been following the path of manned space exploration, with the space station and the space shuttle, and it has been an incredible waste of money. Furthermore, as TFA say, nobody gives a damn.
Manned space flight was a 60's obsession, some odd combination of SciFi, an aviation craze, and the cold war. People don't care anymore.
If NASA doesn't get the next generation of voters and tax-payers interested, they're going to be dead of apathy within the decade.
Yes, and they are going to "get the next generation" by continuing those kinds of missions that have generated the largest amount of interest: missions that send back high resolution imagery and permit everybody on earth to have a part in exploration. Heck, with robotic probes, we could rent out exploratory vehicles so that everybody actually has a real shot at doing something on another planet.
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
A manned mission to Mars and settling Mars are two entirely different propositions; even if we managed to pull of dozens of manned landings on Mars, we'd still be far away from any sort of settlement.
Why bother with exploring space if we're not going to go there?
Who said anything about "not going there"? Eventually, we will settle on Mars. But for now, we're talking about near-term strategy for space exploration, and robotic spacecraft are not only the fastest way for gathering scientific data, they are also the fastest way towards a real manned space program.
If we're going to go ahead with a manned trip to Mars, the project will likely get killed before it ever gets executed, and manned space exploration will be held back by at least half a century.
There are already multiple rating systems for Internet content, including both server-supplied and third party supplied, and you can configure your browser to utilize them to keep yourself from accidentally accessing "bad" content. In fact, many companies implement the NSFW relation through content filtering anyway. It's unclear why we need this markup in addition to all that.
They don't care because it's been a while since NASA has really done anything interesting.
Nothing exciting, that is, except for lots of probes to Mars, Titan, and other bodies, probes that have fundame tally changed out view of the solar system and send back stunning pictures.
It's tough to get excited about space exploration when it's a handful of people riding up and down in a vehicle that's older than most young people's cars,
Indeed, the space station and manned space flight is a waste of money and horribly boring. That's why NASA should focus on robotic space exploration.
But seeing the state to which NASA and the government in general has fallen, I suspect most young people are (wisely) too cynical to believe that will ever occur.
The reason why manned space exploration isn't happening is because it's enormously hard and largely useless: for the cost of a single manned mission to Mars, we can send dozens of robotic probes to every planet and major moon, and get orders of magnitude more scientific data.
Slashdot Mirror
None of which seem to be worth your time to discuss?
What's there to discuss? He simply postulates the ability of robotics and automated manufacturing plants to do what he wants them to do, and the technology just doesn't exist.
"There are plenty of frontiers we have here on earth" Where? Palestine?
Science, engineering, politics, spirituality.
I happen to think that the sociological experiment in America improved life in Europe.
The American "social experiment" worked the way it did because the entire continent had an enormous wealth in natural resources. Mars, in contrast, is a barren wasteland.
And if you're really keen on conducting sociological experiments in barren wastelands, you can do so at a fraction of the cost in plenty of "uninhabitable" places right here on earth.
so I think that having a not-on-Earth petri dish to incubate some new forms of society would be helpful.
A colony on Mars isn't going to be much different from, say, an oil rig or a scientific outpost in Antarctica, except that it's going to be even more expensive. Where exactly are the "new forms of society" going to come from in that kind of environment?
I think that science and progress are not going to be possible in the socio-political climate here on Earth,
Well, and I think the only way we're ever going to colonize other worlds is if we spend the next several centuries making progress here on earth: science, engineering, tinkering with our own biology, social sciences, etc. Only then will we be ready for space. It's not even a question of whether it's the right thing to do, we simply don't have a choice.
We effectively went to the moon with slide rules in one decade once we set it as a goal.
Yes, and we could probably pull off a similar trip to Mars at corresponding costs. The result? If everything worked out, we'd get some Mars rocks, a few days on Mars, and bragging rights. Just like the moon, that kind of landing would not result in a real manned space program or a long-term presence. That kind of project doesn't survive a cost-benefit analysis, and it's not what Zubrin is proposing.
Out of curiosity why is it that you think Zubrin's approach is something which should take decades?
Zubrin proposes a plan that results in a sustainable presence, and for that you need a lot more than "slide rules": you need robotic probes, fully automated manufacturing plants, etc. Neither existing software nor hardware are anywhere near up to that challenge. Even once the technology exists, it will take a number of consecutive missions to test and deploy those probes before people can fly.
No matter how you look at it, even if we followed Zubrin's proposal as much as we can, we'd have decades of robotic probe development and deployment ahead of us.
I do agree that the guy is a bit optimistic regarding cost but he is certainly right that current costs are severely bloated by the atrocity that is cost plus contracting.
The laws of politics are just as limiting for space exploration as the laws of physics.
There are numerous private companies competing to get into space and the prospect of real money for real goals met could be just the shot in the arm those programs need to get beyond the misty eyed dreamer phase most of them have become mired in.
I don't see any indication that the new private space companies are any better than the old ones.
"[No, the reason why we got the ISS and the space shuttles is because of] space nuts who have been watching too much science fiction"
You were involved in arguing for the ISS and the space shuttles??? You must be quite old then.
All of these problems are solvable with simple extrapolations of our current well-proven launch technologies.
Zubrin's argument involves a lot of other economic and technological assumptions.
A fraud? The fraud is that there are other ways to address mankind's ills besides finding new places to put people. [...] Frankly, I dismiss your attitude as self-destructive and self-loathing.
From your statements, it's pretty clear that the self-loathing is on your side: you have so much self-loathing that you think humanity's problems are not fixable, all you want to do is run away from them.
Of course, the irony is that running away doesn't work, it exacerbates the problem. If you think sustainability, population control, and conflict resolution is hard on a planet like Earth, that's nothing compared to what it would have to be inside a domed city on Mars.
Whatever the expected lifetime of the human species on earth may be, because of the much smaller population size and tougher conditions, they lifetime of every off-world colony is going to be a tiny fraction of that; as a consequence, off-world colonies are not going to be a viable means of ensuring human survival until we have both mastered our own biology and have a lot more technology at our disposal.
I believe that, without a frontier, humanity becomes impacted and stagnant.
There are plenty of frontiers we have here on earth, it's just that people like you aren't up to the challenge and want to run away from them. It's you who is self-loathing, anti-science, and anti-progress.
So if something catastrophic happens to Earth, you want mankind's existence in the universe to end.
Selling the idea of a Martian colony as a safeguard against an asteroid hitting earth is a fraud; there is no way a colony on Mars would survive an asteroid hit on earth.
The only way to have an autonomous Mars colony would be to terraform Mars, but for that, preexisting colonization is more of a hindrance than an advantage.
Dashboard isn't a trademark, only a product name (Techically Gnome could be sued because Apple now have the trademark on that, even though Gnome was first).
Yes: Apple has a choice in the naming of their products, and they choose names that conflict with existing usage. Of course, it's more likely ignorance and stupidity on Apple's part, rather than deliberate strategy, given that they have gotten burned by it before (cf Rendezvous/Bonjour).
And, technically, Apple should get their butt kicked if they try to sue Gnome because the logical end result would be that the name was generic for software long before Apple applied for a trademark. I hope they do.
The only secure way on current hardware for automated authentication is not to embed passwords in source code. If you're willing to use extra hardware, your best bet is a smart card.
So, you're not likely to get the parasite from touching everyday objects.
Since when was iTunes legally providing DRM-free music?
The iTunes store isn't, but the iTunes software is: when you rip your CDs. All the music I have is DRM free, and it's all music that I paid for.
Why the excitement? Ignoring all HTPC's completely (which can do the above and more)
I dispute that the HTPC "can" do anything; my experience with it is that it works for a few months and then things gradually stop working. I eventually erased mine completely and it's running Linux now. My home is Windows-free now, except for the rare occasion when I boot into Windows for playing some particular game.
the Xbox 360 can do the above with a Windows box with ease (especially with Vista).
Xbox 360 is itself a rip-off of other boxes and functionality. And if it only works with Windows, I'm not interested.
In any case, the point of such a product is not innovation, it's price, design, form factor, reliability, and functionality. Personally, I'd rather have an Apple iTV sitting on my TV than any box by Microsoft.
As if Apple ever cared about other people's trademarks or designation. "Apple" itself had a predictable conflict. "Dashboard" conflicts with Gnome. Etc.
OS/2 was a fairly well-designed system for its day. Vista is a haphazardly grown "me too" system that is largely a rip-off of features from OS X, UNIX, and Linux.
Of course, there are some analogies: OS/2 was slow on the initially available PCs, but it didn't take long for OS/2 to become a nimble alternative to Windows as machines became faster, Windows got more bloated, and OS/2 stayed roughly the same.
Unlike OS/2, and like previous versions of Windows, Vista will sell: users will have no alternative. If the high pressure sales tactics Microsoft is employing now aren't sufficient, then Microsoft will simply introduce more and more incompatibilities into software and on-line services. So, in the most important respect, Vista is not like OS/2: OS/2 failed because users didn't want it, but what users want or don't want won't make a difference with Vista.
I don't want Vista, just like I didn't want XP, but I will inevitably end up paying for several copies anyway.
Except the goal is to colonize Mars and spread beyond planet Earth, which will ultimately require humans.
Maybe that's your goal, it isn't my goal. I'd rather see the space program killed altogether than waste money on colonizing Mars.
And, you might do well to put away your ad hominem attacks
WHAT "ad hominems"?
I don't disagree with you because I am stupid or ignorant or wrongheaded or mislead.
You're simply failing to make an argument supporting your assertions.
You seem to think that Zubrin's numbers are wrong, but you don't do anything to convince me that you've studied the problem any more closely than he has.
Look, it's not rocket science: you can look at the real-world launch capabilities, transit times, costs, and success rates of sending payloads to Mars and extrapolate.
The Moon missions were 30 years ago.
Yes, and they were a bloody waste of money. Back then, at least people had the excuse that they lacked the technology for a complex robotic mission, but these days, not even that excuse exists.
Robots are great. However, gathering scientific data is not the most important goal of space flight. Going places is the most important goal of space flight.
OK, well, it's a good start that you admit that there is no significant scientific reason for manned space exploration over robotic space exploration.
As for non-scientific reasons, my answer is simple: I'm not interested in non-scientific space exploration. If it comes down to a choice between a manned space program and no space program at all, I'll rather choose no space program at all. Not only is the money better spent on other issues, a manned space program raises illusory hopes that we can escape our problems on earth by escaping to other planets. A manned space program is a fraud as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, there is more ice in the interior of Greenland. The amount of ice in the interior of Greenland depends on the amount of precipitation, not the temperature. That is, warmer temperatures don't reduce the amount of ice in the interior of Greenland as long as the temperatures stay below the melting point. But warmer temperatures increase the amount of moisture in the air and therefore the amount of precipitation in the interior, and that leads to more ice there.
By comparison, some of the strongest snowfalls are in the Sierra Nevada, even though it is not particularly cold, because the air coming in from the Pacific is full of moisture.
Warmer temperatures only decrease the amount of ice in those areas where the temperatures are already near the melting point, which is exactly what we're seeing in the melting and breaking up of ice sheets.
So, overall, more ice in the interior and more ice breaking off from ice shelfs are both consistent with global warming.
Eventually, of course, the temperatures in the interior of Greenland are going to get high enough that the glaciers there start to melt, and then you will see a decrease of the thickness of the ice there. But that's probably still a few decades off.
At this stage, a human is still many times more versatile as a troubleshooter than any machine. We can't seem to build machines yet that react to the unforeseen, whereas intelligent humans can.
For the cost of sending an astronaut, we can send hundreds of individual space probes to Mars. Even if only a few percent of them actually achieved their mission objectives, we'd still come out way ahead in terms of scientific and technological results per dollars spent.
No, the ISS tells you what NASA was able to negotiate out of Congress. It is a technological and exploratory dead end, and exists as a welfare project for the contractors scattered across 50 states. Much better to use that money to fund a REAL manned space program.
NASA could fund contractors just as easily with robotic probes or manned moon or Mars missions. No, the reason why we got the ISS and the space shuttles is because of space nuts who have been watching too much science fiction. And history is repeating itself with people like you pushing prematurely for a manned Mars program. The manned moon and Mars program are going to be the next ISS and space shuttle: overly expensive and of no scientific value, provided they get off the ground at all and don't get canceled first.
And contractors love manned moon and Mars missions since the probability that things get canceled is so high: they never have to do anything that works. At least with dozens of small, robotic missions, mission success and failure for each mission will be obvious.
The Mars Society has made a pretty good case, with detailed mission profiles. The key concept is in-situ propellant production. Rather than shipping your return fuel to Mars, send a dry return vehicle and fuel it on the surface by refining atmospheric gases.
Yes, those are nice ideas. After we have experience with many dozens of robotics probe over the next several decades, we may start a project like that.
If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend. Dr. Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars". I found him extremely convincing.
Well, he is right about the approach, but wrong about the costs and time frame.
Note also that it is pointless to complain about NASA's corporate welfare; those are political realities. Comparing actual, politically workable projects against some a project in a hypothetical, efficient funding environment doesn't make sense. Think about what kind of pork barrel and fraud starting a manned Mars mission would lead to if started now, even if it were technologically feasible. Lots of small, robotic missions are the better choice for now.
No, it just means that the ice that broke off is 5000 years old, nothing more. The structure itself might be much older.
Even if it's actually the structure itself that formed 5000 years ago, that may not be because of temperature, it may be because that's when the glacier reached the water.
But we should start sending the probes soon (like now) to prepare for colonization 15 years from now.
It will take decades and lots of missions just to develop and test the necessary technology for a robotic preparation for an extended stay manned Mars mission, let alone colonization.
BTW - I'm just saying that a Mars mission shouldn't be a "tag and run" type affair.
That's what the current drive for a manned Mars mission will end up planning for, and even that will likely get canceled before it ever gets off the ground. In the meantime, the necessary research and testing of robotic probes is not happening.
That's simply not true. If you'd like to outline why you think it's not feasible, we can have a productive discussion.
Our current capabilities are pretty clear: the ISS tells you what is possible in terms of manned presence in space and at what cost, and the current Mars probes tell you what is possible in terms of launching and landing payloads to Mars. Just extrapolate that to the kind of payload necessary to get men to Mars and back.
NASA could establish a permanent presence on Mars within 20 years for a fraction of their current budget.
Well, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that is possible.
Send a group of people (of both genders so as to make breeding possible) to Mars with enough supplies to live for a year or two.
Sorry, but if you do the math, you'll find that's simply not possible.
The only way humans are going to stay on Mars for any period of time is if that stay is prepared by a fleet of robotic probes, probes that locate usable water, usable energy sources, and generate clean water, stored energy, and breathable atmosphere long before humans ever land.
We absolutely must master robotic space exploration before we can perform any useful manned missions.
Why? Why not have the first mission designed integrally with the ideal of establishing a long-term presence?
Because we lack the money and the technology to do it. We can't even keep that bucket of junk called the ISS going, and Mars is orders of magnitude tougher and more costly to get to and inhabit than the ISS.
Even if the first Mars-tronauts aren't colonists, I think they should absolutely be setting up the colonists' house.
I also absolutely think Detroit should be shipping nuclear powered, anti-gravity flying cars. But they aren't because it's not feasible.
Robotic exploration is what's killing NASA; if they don't restart manned exploratory missions, they're going to go into a death spiral
Quite to the contrary: NASA has been following the path of manned space exploration, with the space station and the space shuttle, and it has been an incredible waste of money. Furthermore, as TFA say, nobody gives a damn.
Manned space flight was a 60's obsession, some odd combination of SciFi, an aviation craze, and the cold war. People don't care anymore.
If NASA doesn't get the next generation of voters and tax-payers interested, they're going to be dead of apathy within the decade.
Yes, and they are going to "get the next generation" by continuing those kinds of missions that have generated the largest amount of interest: missions that send back high resolution imagery and permit everybody on earth to have a part in exploration. Heck, with robotic probes, we could rent out exploratory vehicles so that everybody actually has a real shot at doing something on another planet.
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
A manned mission to Mars and settling Mars are two entirely different propositions; even if we managed to pull of dozens of manned landings on Mars, we'd still be far away from any sort of settlement.
Why bother with exploring space if we're not going to go there?
Who said anything about "not going there"? Eventually, we will settle on Mars. But for now, we're talking about near-term strategy for space exploration, and robotic spacecraft are not only the fastest way for gathering scientific data, they are also the fastest way towards a real manned space program.
If we're going to go ahead with a manned trip to Mars, the project will likely get killed before it ever gets executed, and manned space exploration will be held back by at least half a century.
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They don't care because it's been a while since NASA has really done anything interesting.
Nothing exciting, that is, except for lots of probes to Mars, Titan, and other bodies, probes that have fundame tally changed out view of the solar system and send back stunning pictures.
It's tough to get excited about space exploration when it's a handful of people riding up and down in a vehicle that's older than most young people's cars,
Indeed, the space station and manned space flight is a waste of money and horribly boring. That's why NASA should focus on robotic space exploration.
But seeing the state to which NASA and the government in general has fallen, I suspect most young people are (wisely) too cynical to believe that will ever occur.
The reason why manned space exploration isn't happening is because it's enormously hard and largely useless: for the cost of a single manned mission to Mars, we can send dozens of robotic probes to every planet and major moon, and get orders of magnitude more scientific data.